iMock: Road Trip to Carmel and Solvang

This winter break, we took a few days for a quickie road trip to Carmel and Solvang. The theme of this trip seems to be fairy tale houses... We left early Tues morning, and here's Ella at the beginning of the drive.

Here she is after 20 mins...

Our first stop was at Carmel, which is only a couple of hours away. We enjoyed an afternoon of just strolling and admiring all of the uber adorable fairy tale houses and shopping of course! We happened to find a copy of the new book Carmel's Fairy Tale Cottages that was signed by the author.

The next day, we headed down to Solvang. Although it was only 3.5 hours from Monterey (where we stayed the night before) to Solvang, we had to make a couple of pit stops since little girl didn't like sitting in the car for that long. Here we are at Pismo Beach enjoying some late lunch and coloring while wearing the super stylish sweater from Emi.

We finally made it to Solvang in the late afternoon and luckily was able to enjoy some sunlight before everything was closed and the weather turned frigid and rainy.

We had to take refuge at the hotel pretty early that night and saved the shopping, munching, and sight seeing for the next morning. We started off with some pastries at Mortensen's Bakery, which I thought wasn't all that impressive. I think we're just too spoiled from the Bay Area...

I did however, find their Christmas ornaments super rustic and cute.

They seem to be big on gnomes too! These can be a cool little project for next Christmas.

While Ella and I walked around, Daddy went to the local motorcycle museum, which I'm sure was the highlight of this trip for him.

This Indian motorcycle has a very interesting story behind it. The first owner bought it when his girlfriend left for college and when they got married, he hid it in the barn because he didn't want her to find out about it. He hid it so well that it stayed there for the next 50 years until someone found it while looking for something else in the barn. Needless to say, it was in pristine condition. Now it belongs to the collector who opened this museum.

Our last stop was the Mission Santa Ines, one of the 21 missions built by the Spanish in California. This one is in really good condition and has been maintained and restored quite well.